DVD/150: EVIL UNDER THE SUN (Guy Hamilton, 1982)

Guy Hamilton, who delivered the flat Vimto flavour of THE MIRROR CRACK'D two years earlier, proffered a cheeky glass of fizz with EVIL UNDER THE SUN, the fourth and last EMI Agatha Christie adaptation.

Hamilton had the advantage of a script by Anthony Shaffer who also wrote the earlier DEATH ON THE NILE.

The cast glitter like the sunlit sea of the Majorca locations, tongues firmly in cheek.  It plays like a weekend murder mystery; you suspect the actor playing the victim is sunning themselves on a terrace somewhere just out of sight of the sleuthing.

Peter Ustinov returns for his second outing as Hercule Poirot who is investigating who faked a large diamond brooch.  While staying at an exclusive Adriatic clifftop hotel, one of the guests is murdered in broad daylight - and while all the other guests had a reason for doing it, they also all have unshakeable alibis.

 

 

Shelf or charity shop?  With the cast all popping like champagne corks, Anthony Powell's delicious costumes, John Lanchbery's effervescent Cole Porter-influenced score and charming title water-colours by Hugh Casson, it's sunning itself on the shelf.  Best supporting performance?  Maggie Smith as hotel owner Daphne - she delivers definitive Mag! Her wrists and elbows contribute as much to her performance as her dry delivery, landing her lines with the timing of death.  Sadly she has too few scenes with her character's nemesis Diana Rigg - one of her few successful film appearances.  Best unsupporting performance?  Nicholas Clay's swimming trunks...

 

DVD/150: THE MIRROR CRACK'D (Guy Hamilton, 1980)

Following up MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS and DEATH ON THE NILE was going to be a tough act and so it proved with the moribund THE MIRROR CRACK'D.

Rather optimistically Angela Lansbury was signed to a three-picture deal to play Miss Jane Marple but then they choose a story that sidelines her with a twisted ankle, so Lansbury's scenes mostly consist of her sitting in her living room, being told how the murder investigation is progressing.

It took two people to write the adaptation but it never rises above the serviceable, with much-vaunted scenes of bitchy dialogue between rival actresses played by Elizabeth Taylor and Kim Novak proving to be duds.

The main fault lies with Guy Hamilton; no doubt happier filming his four Bond films, here he cannot give the material any menace as a poisoner stalks a Hollywood film company filming near St. Mary Mead.

Shelf or charity shop?  A grudging shelf as it's part of a rather snazzy Agatha Christie box-set.  Oddly enough, the film's premise which seems far-fetched in the telling is based on a real incident that happened to actress Gene Tierney.  It begins brightly enough with a recreation of a 1950s b/w country house thriller starring Anthony Steel, Dinah Sheridan and Nigel Stock; this turns out to be a film Miss Marple is watching in the village hall.  Fatally, Guy Hamilton directs the main story like he was directing this type of Merton Park b-picture, totally wasting his illustrious cast. Needless to say there were no more films for Angie's 3 picture-deal

 

DVD/150: DEATH ON THE NILE (John Guillermin, 1978)

The second of EMI's Agatha Christie adaptations was based on her 1937 novel and featured a new Poirot.

Albert Finney was unable to repeat his Hercule Poirot so Peter Ustinov replaced him and gives a more humane performance of the character and does not over-pitch it as he tended to do.

Heiress Linnet Ridgeway steals her best friend Jacqueline's boyfriend Simon, but Jacqueline appears on their Egyptian honeymoon, taunting them at every turn.

They elude her by boarding a Nile cruise whose passengers all bear Linnet a grudge: a German doctor she has ridiculed, a widow jealous of her pearls, the widow's companion whose family was ruined by Linnet's father, a romantic novelist sued by Linnet for libel, Linnet's embezzling lawyer - even her maid!

Jacqueline suddenly reappears and joins the cruise.  That night, in drunken hysterics, she shoots Simon in the leg.  The next morning, Linnet is found dead...

Shelf or charity shop? A much-loved film of mine so one for the shelf.  The pace sometimes seems to match the leisurely cruise - in ORIENT EXPRESS, Sidney Lumet's suspects appeared to have no connection to the victim, here Guillermin has to have each of his confront Linnet with their grievance and then, when questioned by Poirot, he shoots possible scenes of each one killing her; it does get a bit repetitive.  But any time spent watching Angela Lansbury's gloriously drunk novellist, the delicious sparring of Bette Davis and Maggie Smith, and Mia Farrow's quite remarkable performance of the playfully obsessive Jacqueline, is marvellous. Added to this, Anthony Powell's Oscar-winning costumes, Nino Rota's sweeping score and Jack Cardiff's lush cinematography makes it a joy to experience.  Guillermin's best sustained sequence is the build-up to the attempt on Linnet's life in the Karnak's Hypostyle Hall as the suspects slowly drift from sunlight into the shadows, seemingly circling Linnet and Simon, in echoing silence...

 

DVD/150: MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (Sidney Lumet, 1974)

The first of four EMI Agatha Christie starry adaptations of the 70s and 80s always brings back the thrill of seeing it on the big screen when first released.

 

Christie's 1934 classic has Hercule Poirot solving the brutal stabbing of a shady businessman on a snowbound train with the usual cross-section of probable and improbable suspects.

Sidney Lumet was always a fine director of actors and here he orchestrates his cast into a wonderful ensemble.

It is almost an anti-thriller: after the murder, there is no feeling of threat to the other characters, just the pleasure of watching Albert Finney's dazzling Poirot question the other passengers one-by-one.

Lumet offered Ingrid Bergman the role of Princess Dragomiroff - after Dietrich said no - but she chose instead the smaller role of the missionary.  He filmed her 5 minute scene in one take - and she won an Oscar for it!

Shelf or charity shop? Total shelf for Lumet's direction, Geoffrey Unsworth's cinematography, Tony Walton's production design and costumes, Richard Rodney Bennett's score and of course that cast!  Pauline Kael, in her New Yorker review, called it a film full of 'turns' which is, of course, the pleasure of watching it.  Personal favourites are Bergman, Finney, John Gielgud's disdainful manservant, and Vanessa Redgrave who has never seemed so relaxed and playful.  Sadly, it would be a lonely cast reunion with only four of the seventeen main cast members still alive at time of writing.  A special mention too for the unnerving montage intro that lingers in the mind as the film progresses and the blue-lit murder scene.

H A P P Y * N E W * Y E A R

Well start as you mean to go on... so, Constant Reader, the first posting of 2006 is to tell you I have FINALLY been to the theatre this year: it took me long enuff!

Tonight Owen and I went to see AND THEN THERE WERE NONE at the Gielgud Theatre - and what a fun night it is! I was worried it would be a standard Agatha Christie stage transfer with the attendant whiff of the warhorse but luckily the book had been given a bit of a buff-up by the excellent Kevin Elyot - whose own plays tend to be about the past haunting the present - and it now cracks along at a brisk pace tinged with a mordant wit.

You know the deal... eight guests are tricked into attending a gathering on an island off the south coast by an unknown person claiming to be a friend of a friend only to find no host just two servants hired for the night. After dinner a record is played and a voice informs them they have been gathered together as the ten all share one thing in common.. they were all implicated in the death of someone in the past but have never been actually accused of the crime. Then one by one they start being murdered...

Christie's rattling good yarn is delivered intact with no happy ending as has been the case in film adaptations, surprisingly what it doesn't have is any real sense of suspense... one sits and waits to see which one will be killed, usually offstage.  But it makes for a fun night out helped by Elyot's script and some fine performances from Gemma Jones as the rigidly moralistic Miss Brent, David Ross' bluff ex-CID policeman, Graham Crowden's world-weary General and the always dependable John Ramm as Rogers, the butler who after the death of his wife still feels the need to almost apologise for the need to move to one of the guest rooms, the smallest of course. Surprisingly the show has not found an audience and is closing next week after a run of nearly three months. 

Hey-ho.